And so the book that acted as a convenient prop for my pics last Sat turns out to be an excellent read. It's been a while since I've gotten pretty glued to a non-fiction book on the MRT...

Here's an interesting excerpt in which the author tries to make the point that some seemingly 'natural' beliefs/ ideals are but ultimately mere human constructs... Yet we resigned and sometimes unthinking humans are just apt to accept things as they are, thinking that things are too entrenched, too well founded to be questioned etc....

He quotes from George Bernard Shaw in this alien title called The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (London, 1928):

You must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays believe that to spend nine years at school, to have old-age and widows' pensions, votes for women and short-skirted ladies in Parliament is part of the order of nature and always was and ever will be; but their great grandmothers would have said that anyone who told them that such things were coming was mad -- and that anyone who wanted them to come was wicked.

This para (esp the first half) is pretty inspiring isn't it... I think it makes a lot of sense, but guess it requires quite a bit of 'rowing against the tide' and a thinking and unlazy person to make improvements to the status quo. I hope that I'll always bear this in mind, and that there will always be a little spark in me to want to change things for the better :)